


A Wash of Broken Bits

by misszeldasayre



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Bounty Hunters, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bounty Hunter Kylo Ren, Bounty Hunter Rey (Star Wars), Enemies to Lovers, F/F, F/M, Past Leia Organa/Han Solo, Rescue Missions, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29395995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misszeldasayre/pseuds/misszeldasayre
Summary: Bounty hunter Ben Solo has not spoken to his father in seven years, and he has no plans to pick up that nasty habit again. But when the Scavenger, known for her deadshot and hidden face, approaches him with a bounty puck bearing Han Solo’s hologram, Ben persuades her to help him track down his father before other hunters collect the reward. As they scour the galaxy for Han, Ben and Rey take off their masks and allow each other to be seen.
Relationships: Amilyn Holdo/Leia Organa, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 20
Collections: To Find Your Kiss: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	1. An Uneasy Alliance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firelord65](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firelord65/gifts).



> Inspired by the following prompts:
> 
> \- Bounty Hunter AU  
> \- Begrudgingly having to work together while still being "enemies"

Ben Solo has not spoken to his father in seven years, and he has no plans to pick up that nasty habit again. Yet somehow he can’t outrun the man’s shadow, no matter how many bounties he brings in for the guild. No matter how many scoundrels he freezes in carbonite.

Han Solo’s specter rears its head again as Ben tucks himself into a booth at the Nevarro cantina, nursing a glass of Corellian whiskey and a raging headache. His last pursuit earned him several thousand credits and a punch to the head before he managed to subdue the target. His helmet absorbed most of the blow, but his head still complains hours later. So Ben dips into his reward to buy a drink and mercifully a few hours alone for the first time in weeks. Several guild members tip their heads in greeting when they pass his table, a gesture he returns in kind, but none of them approach him. He thanks his reputation for affording him this sliver of peace before he accepts another assignment and flies off-world again.

Halfway through Ben’s second drink, a figure clad in white strides into the cantina. Whispers pepper her back as she weaves between booths and stops before Ben. His head protests the intrusion.

“You’ll want to see this.” She drops a puck onto his table before sliding into the booth opposite him. The puck clatters against the durasteel, nearly missing his glass, as it projects a familiar face—weathered since the last time Ben saw it, but familiar nonetheless. Han Solo. 

It’s an ill-kept secret that Ben hails from Solo parentage, so he’s not surprised that another guild member has identified his father. He’s not surprised that once again his father has attracted a bounty on his head. What surprises him is the waif sitting across from him.

They call her the Scavenger, robed head to toe in sandy white gauze and goggles that reflect back Nevarro’s sweltering sun. She’s new on the scene but fast, or so they whisper throughout the cantina after she dragged in a still-steaming corpse, hurled it on the bar, and demanded payment from the guild leaders before they could scream. Since that incident, Ben has pledged to keep his distance from her. No need for trouble on the job.

But now she’s perched across from him, holding his father’s future in the palm of her battered gloves, and Ben has no choice but to get involved. Not if he wants to face his mother again without getting an earful. Still he plays it cool, sipping his whiskey and eyeing the puck without ever picking it up.

“Happens every few years,” he says, hoping his nonchalance will bore her into abandoning the pursuit.

The Scavenger doesn’t cave. “Carbonite won’t be kind to a man his age.”

Carbonite and Solos don’t mix. That much Ben knows from his father’s story and one of his own unfortunate tangles with a Huttese syndicate. But it’s the hologram that does it, Han’s cocky grin flickering up at him.

As he reaches for the puck, her hand darts out first, fingers closing around it before he can object. “Sure is a big bounty.”

He snorts. So it’s money she’s after. That won’t pose a problem, not with access to the Organa purse. “My mother will match it.”

“Hm.” He imagines her eyes widening under her goggles, but when she counters the offer—double the credits or she’ll reel in Han for the Black Sun herself—he starts to realize what kind of person he’s dealing with.

“Double,” he agrees. “But I’m coming with you.”

The table does little to hide her whole body tensing. He can practically hear her thinking aloud, weighing his presence against a heap of credits. It doesn’t take her long. When she sticks out her hand to shake, he almost wishes he wasn’t wearing leather gloves so he could feel her palm against his. He imagines its warmth as she pulls away from his grip.

She leaps up from the booth, ready to sprint the short distance from the cantina to the shipyard. Ben leans back on his bench and takes his sweet time sipping the last of his Corellian whiskey. It does little to relieve his aching head. Her impatience radiates across the table, but it only makes him move slower, leisurely trading his empty glass for his helmet. It slides cool over his face, evening the score between them. Now she has to guess at his expressions, too.

“Hurry!” she exclaims as he follows her from the dim cantina into the blinding light. “Your father does not have a lot of time.” As she turns right and he continues straight, she yelps, “Where are you going? My ship’s this way.”

Ben’s mask converts his chuckle to a sharp bark. Again he watches her tense, but he doesn’t break his stride. “We’re taking my ship.”

* * *

“Are you sure this is flight-worthy?” the Scavenger asks for the third time upon boarding the _Millennium Falcon_. If she asks again, Ben swears he’ll kick her off the ship, puck or no puck. His father’s safety can’t be worth the price of her companionship, and they haven’t even taken off yet.

She doesn’t stop asking questions or prodding around the cockpit from her co-pilot seat after they take off, reducing Nevarro to a pinprick of light in their wake. He contemplates turning around just to shut her up. Then he tries to engage the hyperdrive, but the _Falcon_ refuses to jump to lightspeed. He braces himself for his passenger to make another crack about their safety. Instead she lowers herself into the belly of the freighter—“just to poke around,” she claims—and Ben marvels that a slip of a hunter, too green to warrant his previous consideration, diagnoses the problem faster than he can run a systems repair check.

“The motivator’s malfunctioning,” she calls from below. “You got a droid on board?”

With help from an LE droid, a gift from his mother to his father that got passed down to Ben with the ship, and a starship tool kit, the Scavenger repairs the hyperdrive motivator in a quarter of the time it would’ve taken them to turn back to Nevarro and get it repaired there.

“You know your way around freighters,” Ben says once they’re strapped back into the cockpit, the universe streaking blue past the viewport.

“You get to know them well when you pick them apart.”

It’s more information than she’s offered him about herself since she slipped into his cantina booth, but Ben is hungry to know more. He chalks his curiosity up to professionalism: a bounty hunter must know those around them in order to properly assess threats. He can’t trust her just because she’s willing to fly with him in pursuit of Han Solo. For all he knows, she could still plan to double-cross him along the journey. 

Still there’s something soft about her, behind her angular limbs and sharp words, behind her smooth accent and smooth silks. She keeps her goggles and scarves wrapped around her face even when there is no sand or sun to shield herself from. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to be seen.

* * *

The guild leader’s coordinates lead them to Canto Bight, glittering like Haysian smelt under the _Falcon’s_ thrusters. The Scavenger balks at the sprawling city, dismissing it with a sniff. Ben’s seen a dozen planets like it, opulent on the surface and rotten to the core. A perfect place to lose oneself in a crowd, and Han’s always been good at getting lost.

Once the landing gears are deployed, the Scavenger grabs her staff and prepares to march off the ship and into the spaceport. Ben catches her arm before she can lower the boarding ramp. She shrugs him off, but her warmth lingers on his fingers, like desert sunshine or a steaming cup of caf.

“Big staff, covered face, knives stuffed in your boots.” He’s guessing there, but judging from the way she shifts uncomfortably, he’s spot on. “He’ll spot you coming from a parsec away.”

She sighs. “What do you have in mind?”

He leads her to a closet nestled next to the captain’s quarters. Behind his black tunics and cloaks hide the remnants of his parents’ wardrobes: a few of his father’s vests and his mother’s gowns. He catches the Scavenger fingering a shimmersilk skirt after he turns his back. “Take anything you like.”

“I don’t like anything,” she growls, but she disappears into the closet and rustles around. Outside, Ben counts the scuffs on the white walls, the snags on his cloak, the weapons holstered in his belt. Anything to keep his mind from imagining what might lurk underneath the Scavenger’s robes. No guild member has seen her face and lived to tell the tale. He’s not entirely sure she’s human, but when the rustling stops and she emerges in a low cut white gown, his chest tightens uncomfortably.

She’s human alright, a beautiful one at that. Calloused hands peek out from flowing sleeves. A silver belt cinches tight around her waist. And a small spray of freckles dance across her cheeks. Ben wonders how she developed them if she spends so much time hiding behind a mask of her own making. As he drinks in her lively eyes, he wonders why she bothers hiding.

He learns the answer quickly enough. The leers she attracts from the casino’s patrons are enough to set his stomach churning. “Are they always like that?” he asks after scowling at a particularly bold Caskadag who makes a passing comment about the Scavenger’s pink mouth.

“Not when I have my staff,” she grumbles, although she’s not without weapons. It would draw too much attention for her to cut down the hecklers, so she grits her teeth and pushes through the crowd, hunting for any sign of their quarry. On impulse, Ben slips her fingers between his, unusually bare and warm to the touch.

“A cover,” he explains when she threatens to flip him into the ground, staff or no staff. She blinks, startled, but doesn’t pull away. Soon the unwelcome attention dwindles to a few jealous stares directed at Ben, no doubt because of the woman on his arm.

At a flash of navy and cream, the Scavenger breaks away in pursuit, Ben dodging drunkards and gamblers alike to stay close on her tail. A row of three buns bob against her neck, a beacon in the crowd. He tracks them until they slow and bow in defeat.

“I thought I saw him,” she says as they halt at the bar, the navy vest belonging to an elderly gentleman too wizened to be Han.

Ben’s so caught up in scanning the room for his father, caught up in the Scavenger’s fingers that interlock so perfectly with his, that he doesn’t think to ask her how she knows what his father looks like. Then the tracking fob gleams warm and red in his palm, and he’s tugging her through the crowd, not thinking about their woven hands, nor the sway of her hips in her borrowed dress, but about his father who always seems to be just out of reach.

A faint whine emerges over the hubbub. Another tracking fob. Ben spins to find a tall, horned humanoid digging a blaster into the Scavenger’s back. “Solo’s mine,” the Gotal hisses in Basic. “Hand over the fob and the girl lives.”

He feels the Scavenger twisting at his side, but he doesn’t look her way. To do so would reveal he cares about her fate, and tonight he’s bluffing his hand to avoid a scene. “The guild gave her Solo. No one’s going to blink if you interfere with the Scavenger and she dismembers you bit by bit.”

The Gotal hesitates, palpable confusion morphing into terror. Like Ben, he knows the rumors. No hunter has seen the Scavenger’s face and lived to tell the tale. As he hesitates, their twin tracking fobs flicker dully, and Ben knows they’re losing Han. Every second they waste with the Gotal and Han slips farther from their protection. How many other hunters carry fobs programmed with Han’s biometrics, Ben doesn’t know. But should this assignment transform from a simple rescue mission into a chase, he’ll need to pick up speed and fast.

However, the Gotal doesn’t budge, more concerned with scaring off his rivals and saving his skin than cornering his quarry. When he tightens his grip on the Scavenger, talons digging into her arm, a squeak slips out from her mouth, stifled and involuntary, but pained all the same.

When Ben glances at her, he gives it all away. The Gotal’s green eyes gleam. “One more time. The fob, or I’ll kill your girl.”

Before Ben can reach for his own blaster, the Scavenger elbows her captor in his furry grey stomach. “I’m not his” —she twists from his grip— “and I’m not a _girl_!” Then she spins, delivering a series of blows to the hunter’s chest that send him reeling to the Selonian marble floor. He stills as his skull cracks against the ground.

The Scavenger wipes her knuckles on her rumpled skirt. “That’s the last time I follow you anywhere without my staff.” Ben nods, startling himself by smiling at the idea that she plans to follow him again, and startling more when he catches her returning his smile.

They sweep the casino floor, hawkishly watching the tracking fob for any signs that Han is near, but the fob has gone dark. “So kriffing close,” Ben grumbles as they sweep the cantina one more time and spill out into the glowing streets. Bars and brothels line the streets, as if the casino’s pleasures weren’t enough to satisfy the thirstiest appetites across the galaxy.

The Scavenger gestures to the streams of creatures ambling down the thoroughfare. “Should we check—?” But Ben cuts her off with a shake of his head.

“Not his scene.” 

Their half-hearted search reveals no leads. Ben knows his father’s sixth sense for danger. Were he a gambling man, he’d bet the ship on his hunch that Han spotted something amiss long before the Gotal arrived and dashed to safety, wherever across the karking galaxy that may be.

As they shove their way through the bustling spaceport and approach the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s berth, Ben wonders how best to breach the notion of defeat to the Scavenger. Maybe he should tap out and let his father work out his own squabbles with the Black Sun. Then he sees the thin gold chain hanging from the Falcon’s landing ramp and he knows his father was here. He rips free the dangling charm and presents it to his companion, hope blooming anew in his chest.

A pair of aurodium-plated dice that Ben grew up turning over in his hands.

“Han was here. He wants us to find him.” Excitement and exhaustion coat his words. When she shoots him a skeptical look, he wonders how he can make her understand.

“You got that from a pair of dice?” she says, but she doesn’t know how he held those dice as a young boy and wished to become a pilot like his father. She doesn’t know how the chain was custom-forged to bind the chance cubes together, how his father snagged them for safekeeping before turning over the _Falcon_ to Ben, how the smuggler’s shorthand allows him to say so much with a gesture so insignificant.

“Trust me,” he pleads, even though he knows it’s asking so much from a stranger whose assignment he’s already commandeered. “I think I know where he’s gone.”

She stares at him, hard and long, up and down the length of his body. Under her gaze he feels exposed. More than that, he feels seen in a way that his mask and reputation don’t afford.

Finally she jerks her head in agreement. “You’re settling the fuel tab on your own if you’re wrong.”

“Thank you. For trusting me,” he says because the risk she’s taking in letting him tag along in some pathetic attempt to save his father may cost them both their credibility. Her eyes soften momentarily when he thanks her, then harden like scrap metal scattered in the sand.

“Our interests align,” she replies coolly. “Double the credits, remember?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you have a marvelous Valentine's Day, friend! I tried incorporating several items off of your "general likes" list, but catboy!Kylo's ears didn't want to cooperate with bounty hunter Ben's helmet. :)
> 
> I will post the final installment this coming Friday.


	2. A Mutual Agreement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Ben and the Scavenger trail Han across the galaxy, a closeness springs up between them that both excites and frightens Ben.

The Scavenger’s face coverings return as soon as the _Falcon_ lifts off from Canto Bight. Ben’s sorry to see her glimmering eyes and luminescent smile disappear under the wrappings. He hangs the aurodium dice in the cockpit before following suit and donning his own black mask, allowing all the frustration and wonder of the past few hours to play privately across his face. Losing Han, seeing the Scavenger’s face, holding her hand—all more than he anticipated when she slid the puck his way. He spends the flight to Bespin chastising himself for getting involved.

As the _Falcon_ approaches Cloud City, cutting through whorls of sugarleaf taffy-colored clouds, the Scavenger plasters herself to the transparisteel. A small sigh escapes her scarves.

“Your first time?” he asks, remembering his own awe seeing the spun-candy clouds for the first time as a child, clambering on Chewie’s lap for a better view.

She nods. “There were only dust clouds on Jakku. Nothing like this.”

Jakku. That explains her ragged hand coverings, her scarves and goggles. Ben holds back a crescent smile at the thought of a dead planet springing forth so much life. He wants to know more about this stranger in the copilot seat, but already he sees her stiffening, worrying that she said too much, and he has to diffuse her somehow. So he turns the conversation back to the mission.

“Han won the Falcon off Cloud City’s Baron Administrator with these dice.” Ben passes them to the Scavenger for examination. She turns them over in her palm and he imagines her grinning behind her scarves like she did in the casino.

“Bet the administrator wasn’t too happy about that. Why would Han come back here?”

“He trusts Lando with his life.” Never mind that the last time he sought refuge here, he wound up in carbonite. Han always comes back to the _Falcon_ , and the _Falcon_ always comes back to Lando.

“Something feels off,” the Scavenger grumbles.

“You sound just like him,” Ben shoots back. “It’ll be fine.”

* * *

“That was not fine!” she shouts as the pink and orange clouds disappear into a blur of hyperspace blue. “If that was fine, I don’t know how you’ve survived assignments without me.”

He chuckles because he’s bagged hundreds of bounties, from parole violators to Huttese mobsters, and this newcomer who barely comes up to his shoulder is lecturing him about safety. As if he hadn’t shot his first blaster before she had learned how to walk. It hits him as she’s scolding him—how light his heart feels, how fast his pulse races as she leans over the pilot’s chair to face him, how alive he feels when he loses himself in her gleaming goggles. Sure, he’s enjoyed the hunt before: the satisfaction of a trap well-laid or a victim so unsuspecting that he’s iced them before they can sputter threats or pleas. But that doesn’t compare to having a copilot at his elbow like the Scavenger.

“Lando Calrissian is a…” She fishes for the right word, rolling her staff across her palms as if itching for a fight. “A scoundrel, that’s what he is!”

 _My mother would love you._ He banishes the thought as soon as it hits him, for when has he cared about his mother’s approval and why would he waste time imagining a fantasy too wild for his dreams?

Even Lando had loved the Scavenger when his entourage met at the _Falcon_ ’s landing platform, planting a kiss on her hand before she could draw it away. “What a beautiful friend she must be,” he said, winking at Ben.

“We’re not friends.” The Scavenger gestured to the blasters on their hips, the tracking fob in hand. It blinks dully, infrequently, nothing like it did on Canto Bight. “We’re after Han.”

Lando had chuckled when Ben looked around expectantly, waiting for his father to pop out of some stark white door. “Han irritated Ziton Moj. You know I can’t follow suit.”

“But if you could just—”

Another rusty chuckle from Lando like a relic from bygone days. “Han wouldn’t bring that kind of trouble to my doorstep. Not to an old friend.” His message rang clear: Ben wasn’t welcome to do so, either. Then a skiff bearing the Black Sun emblem flew overhead and all hell broke loose.

Three of Lando’s men fell to the Falleen snipers hanging out of the skiff. Cursing the Solo name, Lando dove for cover amid red bolts that skittered across the platform demanding blood. From her holster, the Scavenger yanked her blaster and fired at the skiff as it made a second pass, but the distance proved too great. Her shots fizzled midair.

“The cannons!” Ben shouted. “Get to the ship!” He turned and sprinted for the boarding ramp without waiting to see if she’d follow. Behind him, she yelped, but her pounding boots closed the distance between them.

Aboard the _Falcon_ , Ben sprinted for the pilot’s chair, preparing for a dogfight. Before he could reach the cockpit, the Scavenger shoved him out of her way and pulled the ship into a steep climb that left Ben stumbling on his way to the gun turret. He had to admire how smoothly she handled the freighter during the firefight, how she flung them into every tight turn like a dancer. Together they reduced their attackers to dust and smoke.

Now, Cloud City and the Falleens long behind them, the Scavenger refuses to give up the pilot’s seat.

“Going there on a hunch was reckless!” Her sharp voice threatens to carve through the durasteel hull. “You endangered Lando. You endangered us!”

“I know my father,” he snaps. “Not you.”

She activates autopilot before turning to face him. “Do you think bounty hunting’s some kind of joke?” In her goggles, his unhelmeted reflection swallows. “I don’t have a senator mother to fall back on if I screw this up for the guild.” She shakes the puck in his face, Han’s hologram flickering along with her voice. “This job means something. These credits mean something.”

He doesn’t know what to say to make things right between them. Any apology he conjures up fizzles like lightsabers melting snow, so he stares until she turns away, rubbing at her arm. Only when she touches it does Ben notice the wine-colored stains seeping through her wrappings.

“You’re hurt.” From seven years in the field, Ben knows her wound is nothing serious, but the sight of her wincing sends concern shivering down his spine. Before she can protest, he’s leading her from the cockpit to the captain’s quarters, where he retrieves the medkit stored beneath his bunk. He hasn’t moved to touch her, still rifling through the medkit for supplies when she begins trembling. Crying, he realizes when she unwinds her scarves from her head as well as her hands. She’s crying and Ben Solo has no idea what to do.

A vague memory takes shape the longer he stares at her, a memory of another crying woman—his mother—perched on this bunk and wrapped in Han’s arms until her tears dried. So Ben reaches for the Scavenger, folding her into an embrace. Her head nestles into his shoulder before he realizes that this gesture, while welcome between couples like his parents were, is not the sort of thing two rival guild members just do.

This is the closest he’s let anyone come to him in years, quarry excluded. The thought dries his mouth and fries his circuits. All he can think about is the faint smell of sunlight and salt lingering in the Scavenger’s hair. Her neat row of buns has fallen out, hair tangling like Ben’s tongue in his throat. He doesn’t trust himself to say the right thing—he’s a Solo, he’s bound to kriff it up—so he stays quiet until he remembers the reason he pulled her into his room.

By now the cut on her bicep has stopped bleeding, but it’s wider and deeper than a scratch. Ben cracks open a bacta canister, smearing ointment on the cut as gently as he can manage. The Scavenger doesn’t wince, not even when the cut, held together only by dried blood, splits open again under Ben’s feather-light touch. After he wraps the wound in a bandage patch, she rolls her arm experimentally a few times and can’t hold back a groan.

She waves away his troubled look with her good hand. “It’ll be fine.” But her lips stay pressed into a thin line and her face blanches when she tries to stand.

“Stay.”

He half-expects her to bolt for the cockpit, but she sinks back onto the bed, hair falling into her face. Although she tries brushing it back with one hand into some semblance of order, it rebels. A frustrated huff escapes her.

Instinct defines a bounty hunter. Honed properly, it leads to more contracts and bigger payouts. Honed properly, it prevents injury and death. When Ben’s instinct propels him to comb the Scavenger’s hair back, he complies. When he realizes his instincts have betrayed him, he freezes, hand against her temple, fingers in her hair.

But she doesn’t fling him from his perch by her side, doesn’t rip his hand apart joint by joint. Instead she leans into the touch, so subtle that Ben wonders if he imagines it. When he moves to withdraw, she frowns.

“I can’t—” She gestures at her head with her newly bandaged arm, but won’t look him in the eye. “Could you—?”

He begins carding his fingers through her hair, working through the snarls until it lies smooth in one fist. Then he portions it into three segments that he attempts to tie back the way she usually wears it. He gives up after spending too much time relishing how she arches into his touch when his nails rake down her scalp. The simple half ponytail he manages to execute is a style he’s seen his mother wear after long days on the Galactic Senate floor when her head aches and she longs to rest. It suits the Scavenger. He hopes she won’t mind.

“You tried it your way,” she says as he finishes tying back her hair. “Now we’re trying it my way.” It takes Ben a moment to realize that she’s talking about the hunt for Han, not her new hairstyle. “Tell me about him.”

So he does, from Han’s childhood on Corellia to his accidental leap into the Rebellion, his spice smuggling days and his quick trigger finger. Chewbacca, Leia, Lando—their relationships with Han spring to life like holograms as Ben weaves stories that transport them across the galaxy from the comfort of the bunk. He leaves out the parts about Han as a father, the flying and the leaving, the laughing and the shouting. After all, Ben has a reputation to protect and the Scavenger is just a temporary ally. As he leaves those parts out, though, he senses that somehow she reads between the lines and understands the silence like she understands his words. She doesn’t pry. For that, Ben is grateful.

She does laugh, however, a warm belly laugh that sets Ben’s ears glowing as he regales her with a tale of Han and Leia’s courtship days. “Senator Organa puts up with too much from him,” she jests when Ben pauses for breath.

It punches him in the gut, her assumption that his parents are still together. Not that his mother isn’t happier without Han weighing on her soul. But it still stings, the way they split, the last time he saw his dad. Rage sears the fringes of his vision, so he grounds himself in the softness of the sheets against his palms, in the Scavenger’s twinkling eyes. He can’t let her see him come undone.

“Probably pissed off the Black Sun just to irritate my mother.”

“If he’s anything like you, he didn’t have a problem doing that,” she sighs, but her mouth ticks upward and Ben thanks the stars that he can see her grin. It lights up the cockpit like a Tatooine sunrise, warming him from the inside out.

“You like it,” he says, pushing his luck because after they find his father, this will screech to a grinding halt. Whatever _this_ is.

She freezes, and Ben worries he’s pushed too far. How presumptuous he is to place value on this partnership of convenience, two uneasy allies pushed apart by the same line of work. Then she touches him, grabs his knee with her calloused fingers, a gesture so familiar and easy that it turns Ben’s calamitous thoughts radiant.

“That’s where Han is!” she exclaims. “With your mother.”

“But they’re not together.” Kriff, Ben’s not even sure his parents are on speaking terms at this point. He fights to keep the bitterness from his tone, but it seeps through anyway. He hopes the Scavenger doesn’t notice, but she’s aptly named, mining through the sparest of information and pulling out the clues to assemble the toughest of puzzles.

She doesn’t remove her hand from his knee. Her brows soften; her grip grows gentler. “That doesn’t mean they’re not still close. Decades of shared adventures will do that.”

When she pauses, Ben loses himself in imagining a future sharing adventures with this hunter by his side. Then she continues and his wildest dreams evaporate.

“He doesn’t fully trust Lando. Never will. Chewbacca’s probably laying low. You haven’t seen him in years. That leaves your mother. No matter how lonely or desperate a person gets, family is still family.” Longing suffuses her voice. In it, Ben sees a windswept desert, sand for miles but no one to call home.

“Chandrila,” he says. “My mother’s on Chandrila.”

She leaps to her feet, bandaged arm and all, striding out of the captain’s quarters and beelining for the cockpit with Ben at her heels. “Then we’ll fly to Chandrila.”

Once she programs the coordinates to his homeworld and settles into the pilot’s chair, growing increasingly more comfortable assuming that position (no matter that the _Falcon_ is Ben’s ship), she turns to him. “You’re not going to argue?”

He looms over her chair, unsure of whether to settle in at her side or retreat to another chamber. “You followed me to Bespin. I’ll join you anywhere.”

The weight of his words settles around them. At first, he curses his blazing ears and her impassive countenance. She might as well be wearing her mask for all that her face reveals. Then she’s leaning in and so is he, and for a moment it seems that their lips are on course to collide. He’s not sure who changes course at the last minute, pulling away like a meteor skimming the _Falcon_ ’s hull, staring wide-eyed as distance spawns between them anew.

“We can’t.” Brittle, raw, like a throne room on fire, her voice trembles like the rest of her body.

“No.” But he won’t apologize because he’s not sorry when every cell in his body urges him closer to her light. He wants to ask her why she’s shying away, or ask himself why he can’t let himself be happy for one karking moment. He’s more questions than man, more hunted than hunter, and right now he longs for her trap to snap around his legs and reel him in so close he can’t ever escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe this "final chapter" ballooned into two chapters... Let's just say that Han didn't like the idea of his reveal being overshadowed by Ben and Rey's reluctant intimacy, not that this anonymous author is still fiddling with the ending to make sure it strikes the right balance between the genres you like. :)


End file.
